1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to ink jet textile printing apparatuses that each perform printing on a textile by ejecting ink from an ink jet recording head.
2. Related Art
Until recent years, printing on textiles made of cotton, silk, wool, chemical fiber, blended yarn, and the like was mainly performed using screen printing apparatuses that require stencils. In recent years, however, with the technological advancement of ink jet printers, ink jet textile printing apparatuses based on the ink jet printing technique have been attracting attention.
In ink jet textile printing, no stencils, which are required in screen printing, are required and digitalized designs can be utilized. Hence, quick responses to detail design changes, for example, can be realized in accordance with customers' needs. Furthermore, the production time can be largely reduced. In addition, design flexibility is advantageously high, enabling color gradation, for example.
In an ink jet textile printing apparatus, when cloth, i.e., a recording medium, is transported toward a printing section that performs ink jet printing, the cloth is pasted to a transporting belt having an adhesive surface so that transportation accuracy can be improved. In this state, the transporting belt is rotated by transporting rollers or the like.
In the case where cloth is pasted to the transporting belt having an adhesive surface, air may become trapped in some regions between the transporting belt and the cloth, resulting in lifting of such regions of the cloth from the transporting belt.
If cloth is transported to a position below the printing section in a state where any regions of the cloth are lifted by air, the lifted regions may interfere with the recording head of the printing section, causing problems such as contamination of the cloth and damage to the recording head. Moreover, if printing is performed on cloth having any regions thereof lifted by air, another problem may arise in that the quality of an image printed thereon is deteriorated. Particularly, in a case where cloth has a large width, it is more difficult to evenly paste the cloth to the transporting belt. This increases the probability of occurrence of the aforementioned problems.
To evenly paste the cloth to the transporting belt, referring to FIG. 10, an exemplary ink jet textile printing apparatus 31 disclosed in JP-A-7-214766 includes a pasting roller 32 disposed at a position on the upstream side with respect to a printing section 4 and facing a transporting roller 15 across a transporting belt 7 so as to urge cloth 2 with a predetermined force.
In such a configuration, however, if a large region of the cloth 2 is lifted by a large amount of air, the cloth 2 that has been squeezed between the pasting roller 32 and the transporting roller 15 may be pasted with wrinkles to the transporting belt 7.